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Samuel Workman, Ph.D.
I am a political scientist working at the intersection of American politics, public policy, statistics, and data science. I research the bureaucracy, regulatory politics and policy, and how institutions and organizations search for, generate, and use information. My work typically emphasizes text-as-data, machine learning, and statistical modeling, especially classification, stochastic processes, and likelihood methods. Current academic projects examine congressional bureaucracies, the politics of numbers and measurement, the regulatory politics of education policy, and agenda-setting in food policy.
My teaching spans American politics, public policy, public administration, and research methods. My approach emphasizes an interactive classroom that brings research and data to bear in illustrating key concepts, theories, and characteristics of governing and policy systems. The goal is to help students the politics of these systems and reason through the tradeoffs and tensions inherent in governing systems, public policy, and within organizations.
I also provide statistical consulting in the private sector, specializing in the grocery floral category. My work focuses on data-driven decision-making and management, custom reporting, and data-informed programming. I am a contributor at Towards Data Science, where I write on practical applications of data science and statistics. I am also one of the founding Editors of 3Streams. In addition to editorial duty, I write on rural politics and policy, including Appalachia’s politics. My popular writing on data science and rural politics has received over 10k views.
Skills & Experience
- Policy research, data management, statistical analysis & modeling, presentation, reporting & data visualization, machine learning
- Project Management, grant writing, team leadership & coordination, public speaking
- Market, sales, and inventory analysis, reporting, and visualization, data-driven decision-making and management
- Languages: , \(\LaTeX\), SAS, SPSS, VBA, SQL, Markdown, CSS, HTML
- Applications: Rstudio, WinEdt, Beamer, binb, xaringan, MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, SQLite
Academic Position
Associate Professor of Political Science
The University of Oklahoma
Norman, OK USA
2021 - 2016
- Faculty Member, Center for Risk & Crisis Management
- Faculty Member, Big Data & Statistics Working Group
- Faculty Affiliate, The Comparative Agendas Project, University of Texas
- Faculty Affiliate, Advanced Quantitative Methods Group, Department of Sociology
Education
Ph.D., Political Science
University of Washington
Seattle, WV
2009 - 2005
- Fields: American Politics, Public Policy, & Research Methodology
- Dissertation: Economizing Attention: Agendas and the Influence of Bureaucracy in American Politics
- Graduate Fellow of the Center for American Politics & Public Policy
Current Grant
Organizational Problem Solving and the Use of Research in Education Policy
National Science Foundation, Science of Organizations, Award No. 1827494, $455,640
N/A
2021 - 2018
- Samuel Workman (PI) and Deven Carlson (Co-PI)
In Progress
Measuring Interest Group Agendas in Regulatory Proposals: A Method and the Case of U.S. Education Policy
Interest Groups and Advocacy - Revise & Resubmit.
N/A
2021
- Samuel Workman, Deven Carlson, Tracey Bark, and Elizabeth Bell
Organizational Structure and Policy Change in U.S. Federal Bureaucracies
Regulation and Governance - Under Review.
N/A
2021
- Samuel Workman, Scott E. Robinson, and Tracey Bark
Forthcoming Scholarship
Methods of the Policy Process
Routlege
Abingdon, UK
2021
- Christopher M. Weible & Samuel Workman, Editors
- Forthcoming, May 2021
The Code and Craft of Punctuated Equilibrium
Methods of the Policy Process
N/A
2021
- Samuel Workman, Frank R. Baumgartner, & Bryan D. Jones
- Forthcoming, May 2021
Building a Smarter Government: Practical Lessons for Policymakers from Punctuated Equilibrium Theory
Practical Lessons from Policy Theories
N/A
2021
- Chris Koski & Samuel Workman
- Forthcoming, April 2021